There Was a Time That I Knew You

This work has carried multiple titles across its life, including There Was a Time That I Knew You, Third Cast of Burdock Light, and It Was in Dreams That We Knew Each Other. I began writing this work in the winter of 2018, shortly after I arrived in Seattle, composing it exclusively on a 1875 Taylor & Farley reed organ in poor condition.

At the time, I was drawn to the instrument for its physicality — the breath, the resistance of the bellows, the way sustained sound required constant bodily negotiation. The earliest versions of the work were fragmentary and intuitive, built from sections that could expand, contract, repeat, or dissolve without a fixed trajectory.

The first performances live of the piece consisted of a 10–15 minute version of the section Third Cast of Burdock Light, presented during a short tour for my album Earth Drones. I performed this version in Los Angeles (Rec Center) and San Francisco (Adobe Books) in September of 2018, and later that October in Bellingham, Washington at midnight during the “A-Wake” 24-hour festival (Alternative Library).

After I returned, in November 2018, I carried the organ to a campsite in the Hoh Rainforest, where I recorded a twenty-five-minute instrumental version overlooking the river in the rain. At the time, I believed this recording might be complete, but the pull to merge it with another emerging section — There Was a Time That I Knew You — was too strong for me to ignore.

Over the next year (2019), I continued adding and removing material with the intention of allowing the piece to exist without a predetermined duration. After eventually giving away the original parlor organ due to severe bellows leaks (making it impossible to play), the work continued primarily on a portable Estey reed organ from the 1940s. I actually aquired this portable organ on my 2018 tour when I found it on Ebay in Las Vegas, and picked it up from the guy directly. Before that tour, I practiced and prepared the piece on the small organ while camping in the Mojave Desert.

At the stage where the composition still existed as two distinct parts, my friend Signe Ferguson aquired a small space in Capitol Hill. She wanted to activate it somehow, and invited me to perform my work. I decided to try performing in a new format - one I coined as “durationless” - where the piece had no fixed duration and only moving parts that I could add and remove improvisationally without time restrictions. I presented the first part of the work, There Was a Time That I Knew You, in March 2019 at this space we called “The Annex”. The performance lasted approximately an hour and a half and was paired with field recordings captured on the Oregon coast while observing a whale migration.

Later that year, in September 2019, I decided to expand the work, combining the two parts (“Third Cast..” and “There Was a Time..”), and performed them together as a three-hour continuous version at Studio Ma in Seattle alongside the same coastal recordings. Only a handful of people came throughout the evening, but the experience remained deeply important to me.

Upon some research, the portable Estey organs themselves were originally manufactured for use by ministers during World War II, though many found their way into American homes (like the giant parlor organs). However, from early on, I still deeply imagined the instrument living in just intonation, with the reeds tuned to whole-number ratios that could allow the overtone series to fully resonate and align more purely with the voice. For years, however, I couldn’t determine how to access the reeds without damaging the instrument.

In the fall of 2023, I decided to try again after a lot of experience tuning harmoniums and shruti boxes for various works. I dismantled the organ and discovered the reeds were much more accessible than I had thought. They were also in excellent condition and responded very well to tuning with very little drift (except for one reed!). I drafted a just intonation tuning specifically for this piece and, following an invitation from my friend Nat Evans, performed a forty-five-minute improvised version at Chapel Performance Space in Seattle on October 7th, 2023. That performance used a two-hour field recording from Rialto Beach — the same recording used earlier in The Wind That Rolls Upon the Water.

During that concert, I realized something had shifted. By allowing the piece to remain infinitely expandable, I realized it would always feel unfinished. So in the months that followed, several deeply emotional experiences in my life allowed me to finally complete the lyrics and organize the work into a fixed form that felt whole to my heart.

In November 2023, I returned with the organ to quiet spot beside the Hoh River and recorded the hour-long version of the piece. It now carries a new title and will be released in time.